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THE VALUE OF ANCIENT 

HISTORY 



A LECTURE DELIVERED AT OXFORD 
MAY 13TH, 1910 



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The Value of Ancient History 

' The purpose of the enquiry of Herodotus of Hali- 
carnassus is this ; to prevent the works of men from 
becoming obliterated by time and to ensure that great and 
admirable deeds, some performed by Greeks, some by 
foreigners, should not lose their renown ; and, more par- 
ticularly, why they fought with one another.' 



Such is the brief preface with which the Father of 
History inaugurates his work : so brief, that it reads more 
like a title page than a preface ; and indeed deserves 
to be set out as such some day on the first leaf of an 
edition. But this title-page to all History is also more 
than a preface ; it is the announcement of a discovery, 
and the definition of a science and an art. 

Inspired by the exaltation of soul which carried 
the Greeks through their National Birth struggle, the 
first Pan-Hellenic Act since the Trojan War, Herodotus 
writes in the calm after the storm, with adjustment and 
expansion still active around him ; and looking back, 
as Milton could look back over the Elizabethan Age, 
or Victor Hugo over the Napoleonic, sees that Heroic 
Age far enough off to be contemplated whole ; yet near 
enough still for the Divine Justice and Mercy to be very 
real and terrible. 

The purpose of his enquiry was consciously present 
to him. His title-page and preface are the key to his 
whole book ; their significance does not end here. ' Great 
actions,' he would say, 'like the recent events, have 
value and interest for mankind ; they are memorabilia, 
and therefore memoranda ; to koKov is Bcojuaa-rop and 



to Ow/xaros a£iov is also to a^iairrjyriTOV.'' That is 
his first point ; and the second stands very near to it. 
For Herodotus, it makes no difference at all whether 
the doers of deeds, which have won their way to the 
heroic, were Greeks of his own blood, or not. Greece had 
won, but Persia was an enemy worth beating — fas est 
et ab hosle doceri — and his portraits of great Persians 
— Harpagus, Zopyrus, Megabazus, Artabanus, Darius 
himself, above all perhaps Mardonius — are there to show 
how well he practised what he preached. It begins, 
this second discovery, as matter of common honesty, 
of historical impartiality ; but its excellence is in his 
dramatic sense of the balance and proportion in which 
events stand to one another. It can degenerate, no 
doubt, into exaggerated craving for symmetry, a child- 
like weighing of the souls of Poly crates and Oroetes 
against each other ; but it can also explain and excuse the 
pageantry of Oriental life by which he is ever labouring 
to force home on a lecture-room audience the realities 
of the Persian Empire. Aeschylus alone comes as near 
to make us understand the Great King with his Court and 
his Elders; and Aeschylus too was a Master of the 
Pageant. 

His third point is different, and it is here that Hero- 
dotus shows most his originality; is most truly the Father 
of History. Ta Te aWa, /cat 6V rjv amV. Human actions 
spring from causes, and these causes are reasons why 
they are the ends which men propose for their aims and 
acts to realise. Thucydides could distinguish, after- 
wards, that there may be ahlat kcu Trpo<pdarei$ : causes, 
that is, clear enough to the spectator, who is the historian, 
but unperceived by the actors in the drama ; or motives 
which the men themselves felt, and confessed, to be 
their impulse to act ; though these also the historian 
must verify. But that is subsequent' refinement. 
Herodotus' original cnroSegt? is itself inclusive and clear. 
There can be a philosophy of History, based upon 
accurate knowledge of great deeds, appealing ever to 



5 

experience and humanity ; accepting uniformities of 
Nature and of Human behaviour as it unveils them, but 
utilizing these discoveries to state and restate the Note- 
worthy Fact with new precision, new comeliness, and 
so new claim to remembrance and admiration. How 
often, on the other hand, is it when he omits to record 
dcofAao-TOv n, is his apology just this — ovk ex<D eiireiv 
arpeKeco^. 

And to what end will he expend all this labour ? 
This does not come out explicitly in the preface, but 
it is clear in the body of the book. 

Uniformities in the past, accurately established, 
and (no less) our experience, gained by accurate observa- 
tion, of the very unexpectedness of human behaviour, 
have practical value, as well as aesthetic and scientific. 

This aspect of great deeds as effects and, in their 
turn, as causes, must needs have determined for anyone 
who saw it as clearly as Herodotus, the choice of his 
Otouao-Tu and a^iainjyrjTo.. No one of course acts 
always up to the high level of his determination : Herodo- 
tus was often led by seeming connexions, to set things 
down in his book, which it surprises us now to find in it 
at all, or at any rate, to find where they stand. But 
to admit this is a very different thing from condemning 
Herodotus as garrulous or irrelevant ; he would rather 
be a wise agnostic, who would say, ' When we know a 
little more, for certain, about the canons of relevance 
in pre-Socratic Greece, about relevance in Pindar, and 
in the Tragedians, we will return with some confidence 
to the digressions and " asides " of Herodotus. When 
we know as much of Corinth or Periander as Herodotus 
might assume that any public of his would know — 
we may pardon him if he forgot that his book might 
live ! — we shall perhaps be at a standpoint to enjoy 
the thrice-told tale of Arion and the Dolphin, as he 
himself enjoyed it when he retold it first in public (in 
I. 13) with Periander not Arion in the hero's part : 
we shall appreciate no less, if we are historians at all, 



the old man's pride that other time when he could add 
6fx6\oyeovcri Se ol AtV/8tot.' 

That great deeds have inherent value for us ; that 
this value is essentially independent of the accidents 
of race or environment ; ' fire burns/ as we say, ' here 
and in Persia ' ; and here and in Persia virtue shines 
too — but on the other hand the value depends 
essentially on their interest as causes and effects — 
this is the simple faith of Herodotus of Halicarnassus ; 
and I do not know that modern historians have greatly 
improved upon it. 

To support this impression, I summarise very briefly 
the profession of faith of a great living historian : it 
is the more apt to my purpose because Dr. Eduard 
Meyer has traversed , as no one else has, that portion of 
antiquity with which Herodotus deals.* 'All history,' 
he says, ' is a presentation of processes, or, more accur- 
ately speaking, of changes which take place in time . . . 
The primary and fundamental task of the historian is 
the transmission of facts which were once actual.' We 
seem to catch Ionic resonance : o>? /*^ to. yet/6/m.eva e£ 
av6p(tiira)v tu> XP^ V( ? f^V^Xa yeV^Tcu.' Then arises the 
fundamental question, ' which of the processes, of which 
we have record, are '' historical " ? and to this the 
reply is, that ' that is historical which really is or was.' 
. . . . On what, then, rests the further selection which 
each historian actually makes among them ? ' Here 
also only the Present can give the answer ; the selection 
rests on the historical interest which the Present takes 
in any effect or result of development (epya fxeyaXa /ecu 
QcofxaaTa) so that it feels the need of investigating the 
motives which brought it about.' {ra re a\\a kcu St 
rjv airitjv). ' The wider the circle is, over which the 
effects of a historical event extend, the more important 
is it, and the greater therefore the interest which we 
attribute to it.' Clearly, therefore, events which are 
international are of higher historical interest than any 

" Eduard Meyer. Zur Theorie und Methodik der Geschichte. Halle, 1908. 



parochial occurrence ; and if so, we may fairly catch again 
the Herodotean echo, tu /uep "EM^o-i to. Se 8apfidpoi<ri 
airoSexOtvra. This is notable agreement between his- 
torians of earliest and latest date ; and it gives us 
approximately a definition of history which may content 
us, and at the same time be a first answer to the ques- 
tion what constitutes the value of history, and of a 
historical fact. 

It will be clear already, I think, that history — 
whether ancient, as for Bduard Meyer, or modern, as 
for Herodotus, who was writing in the first instance 
about the events of his own parents' lifetime — has, 
as a form of knowledge and enquiry, a twofold aspect. 
As an investigation of what really happened, it is as 
thoroughly a science as geology or botany, or anyother 
non-experimental branch of learning. But as a science 
which selects from among the things which have happened 
the things which are of interest, and regards only those 
things as being of interest which are seen to have been 
instrumental in bringing about ' the present,' History 
stands alone ; or rather, takes rank among those other 
branches of knowledge, like the study of Art or Morals, 
which are concerned not solely with the discovery and 
record of facts, and the ascertainment of the relations 
between them ; but also with the application of a stand- 
ard of value. History is a science of observation, it is 
true ; but it is also a critical science. Its standard is one 
of value as well as of relevance ; it relates its facts not 
only to other facts, but to the judgment and to the 
service of Man. 

History, then, is only conceivable on an anthropo- 
centric basis ; in relation that is to ourselves ; the his- 
torical value of each occurrence depends upon our 
judgment of the influence which it has had in bringing 
about the present state of things. But, as we have seen 
already, ' the larger the circle is over which the influence 
of a historical occurrence extends, the more important 
is it, and so also the greater is the interest which we 



8 

attribute to it.' There are of course, as Eduard Meyer 
goes on to point out, in the passage from which I have 
quoted, great occurrences in the growth of civilization, 
such as the rise of a new religion, or the creation of a 
great work of literature or art, whereby Man, or rather 
that section of Mankind which includes ourselves, has 
been permanently enriched and fortified in its struggle 
to live well. But these, though the circumstances of 
their origin are a historical fact, yet tend, when once 
originated, to pass out of general history, and become 
the subject of what we currently describe as the special 
' history ' of them. There is a history of Mohammed- 
anism, for example, and there is a history of Poetry 
and of Iron, in which the standard of relevance and of 
interest is set, not by the End of Man, but by the con- 
ception of Man as employer of iron, creator and appre- 
ciator of poetry and the like. But apart from these 
occurrences of high rank, whereby Man has accumulated 
his instruments for living (as Aristotle might have put 
it), the most decisive occurrences are those which we 
call political. These have the strongest because the 
deepest and intensest influence upon the course of events ; 
and it is on this ground that we regard political history as 
(in the Greek sense) the central branch of the study. 

The reason for this pre-eminence is clear. Among 
all the suggested definitions of Mankind, as we know, 
none so clearly hits the mark as that of Aristotle, that 
Man is a ttoXitikov £coov. Man's unique and supreme 
instrument for living at all, and still more for living well, 
is his power to associate himself with others of his kind ; 
to subordinate personal to corporate aims, and in 
rare cases to discover new corporate aims, and create 
associations which can achieve them. Popular language, 
I think, supports us also here : when we speak of the 
' great men ' of a people or of a period, it is, I think, 
only in the second place that we think of the poets, 
and the other inventors and discoverers ; what we mean 
when we speak of someone as a ' great man ' without 



further qualification, is primarily this, that he did great 
deeds — epya /xeyaXa kcu Oatixaa-Ta — in the Herodotean 
sense ; that he took a leading part in shaping or guiding 
or preserving his State ; either in making, that is, or in 
using for its true end, that supreme association of which 
the purpose is to ensure that its members shall live well. 

We now come to a rather disconcerting fact. After 
the ' great men ' of action, who (as we commonly say) 
' make history,' those who stand next in the hierarchy 
of greatness are the ' great men ' of thoughts, the makers 
of ideas and standards ; and clearly prominent among 
these come those ' great men ' who in every age have 
made, not history, but histories. To have transmitted 
to posterity authentic record of the great deed, and of 
the reason why, is a claim to remembrance, and to his- 
toric importance, only less imperative than to have done 
the great deed itself, or to have conceived the idea 
which inspired it ; and such a record itself will be of 
greater or less historic interest and value, according, as 
it affects a wider or a narrower circle. It follows that 
the work — that is to say, the ' works ' in the literary 
sense — of the great historians in the past stand for the 
historian in the present on a plane of historic value only 
less high than the historic deeds which they commem- 
orate. In this respect, History stands almost alone 
among the critical sciences ; for it is only in the rarest 
instances that the works of a historian of painting or 
poetry can in any sense be said to transmit to us 
authentic record of the works of art or literature whose 
meaning they interpret. 

History, as we have seen, is a critical science ; 
and like all other critical sciences partakes also of the 
nature of an Art. Iyike the criticism of literature or 
morals, the practice of it presumes experience ; and 
experience of two kinds. A historian's training is a 
double task. He must learn to write history ; to ascer- 
tain his facts with as rigorous accuracy as a geologist, 
or a naturalist ; and to interpret their importance by 



10 

his standard of historical value, as a moralist interprets 
conduct by his standard of right and wrong, or as a 
critic interprets a poem or picture by his standard of 
fair and foul. But he has first to ascertain his facts ; 
and, in most branches of History, a large proportion 
of his facts are transmitted to him by other historians 
more or less consciously acting with intent to preserve 
remembrance of great deeds, according to their own 
standards of epya /xeyaXa kou Ooo/macrTu. The student of 
history needs therefore not only to have his own standard 
of historical interest, but also to be able to estimate and 
criticise the standards of other persons, who may be 
posed in any conceivable plane in the perspective between 
the historian's own place in the present, and the plane 
of those past events which is the object of transmission. 
All history, therefore, like all critical science, de- 
mands critical insight as well as technical accuracy and 
constructive ability. But all these are only acquired 
by experience. In history, indeed, as in all other forms 
either of critical or of creative activity, all lectures 
and text-books are essentially and merely introductory. 
They can illustrate the methods of history ; they can 
supply you with the materials ; but history itself they 
cannot teach you ; still less can they make you into 
historians any more than into philosophers or painters 
or good men. It is only by making histories for your- 
selves that you can hope either to become historians, 
or to do justice to the work of the men who have made 
histories before you. 

II 

So much for that general conception of what history 
is, and of its value, with which, I think, we shall come 
most safely to the study of it. All that I have said so 
far, however, has been intended to be equally applicable 
to all history — ancient and modern alike — and if, later 
on, I have occasion to contrast our actual methods of 



II 

dealing with different periods of history, it must needs 
be either to regret anomalies, or to justify their existence. 

But now we come to more special considerations. 
The terms ancient and modern history do, after all, 
stand for a very real distinction. Ancient history does 
not merely deal with an earlier period in the general 
history of mankind ; it has to discover and verify its 
facts under conditions of stud}'' which are peculiar ; 
and the facts, when discovered, turn out to belong, for 
the most part, to rather special classes. Consequently 
' ancient ' historians are under strong temptation to fill 
the gaps in their knowledge, which they are every day 
more free to admit, from adjacent sources of learning, and 
consequently also, it is essential for students of ancient 
history to start with clear ideas of the functions of 
History itself, and also of its frontier lines towards 
these neighbouring fields of knowledge. 

But we must go further than this. Ancient history 
does not merely deal with facts of a special kind, ascer- 
tained under special conditions, and belonging to a 
special period of time. Not all facts belonging to this 
period are included in its domain at all ; and those which 
do belong are defined and characterised quite as pre- 
cisely by the place as by the time of their occurrence. 
There is a good reason, which it is for the historian to 
discover, why Greek history falls within the particular 
centuries which it fills ; but there is equally good reason 
why it falls in the Mediterranean region, and round the 
shores of the Aegean Sea. Even if we knew the history 
of the Mississippi as we know that of the Nile, it could 
never rank in the same sense as ancient history ; but 
would remain, as now, a matter of indifference to his- 
torians. In reality, the geographical area within which 
events count as historic during the periods which are 
claimed by ancient history, is very narrowly and very 
precisely limited ; nor is it easy to conceive in what way 
these geographical limits can ever be seriously challenged. 
So rigid is the control which nature has imposed upon the 



12 

most successful enterprises even of an animal so migratory 
and intrusive as Man. Let me explain very briefly what 
I mean. 

The main current of human history has passed 
(from the point where we can first trace it) through three 
principal phases, and is perhaps now entering upon a 
fourth ; and each of these phases stands intimately 
related to distinct geographical surroundings.* 

The first stage is one in which the sole centres of 
advancement are provided, and defined by great river 
valleys, with alluvial irrigable soil. The precise course 
of events in Mesopotamia and in Egypt has depended, 
in detail, upon external factors ; but the common char- 
acter of what the historians group together as the Ancient 
East, is that of detached riparian and agricultural civil- 
izations, in recurrent peril from the men of the steppe 
and the mountain, and only in intermittent touch with 
each other. 

Each of these self-centred and almost self-sufficient 
worlds has its own special type of civilization adapted 
to the local conditions ; but each is in its essentials 
the duplicate of the other. Outside these twin sources 
of light lies for the most part darkness or satellites. 

The second phase of history opened when the dwel- 
lers round the shores of a Midland Sea, and above all, 
on the islands secluded within one gulf of it, began to 
make interchange of commodities, and thereby grew up 
to the conception of the habitable world as a ireploSo? 
yijg, an Orbis Terrarum, a ring of countries convergent 
about a single basin of water. That this conception of a 
ring of lands lasted so persistently and produced in 
Greek and Roman life the practical consequences which 
it did, is due to the fact that it did actually represent 
accurately the geographical conditions in which Greeks 
and Romans lived ; for if we look at the great civiliza- 
tion which grew up in the Mediterranean lands, I think 

* The paragraphs which follow are abbreviated from $ iv of a paper on the Place of 
Classical Geography in a Classical Curriculum, read in 1909 at a meeting of the Classical 
Association of Scotland. 



*3 

we shall see that each principal phase of that civilization 
was obviously and emphatically a Mediterranean one; 
and that it owed its greatness to its conformity to Medi- 
terranean conditions. The empires of Minos, of Athens, 
and of Rome are but three attempts to realise a civilised 
Orbis Terrarum, convergent round the margin of a 
single water-basin. The momentary efforts of Alexander, 
of Augustus, and of Trajan, to transcend these limits 
die with their authors, or before them. Only the genius 
of Caesar foreknew that when he crossed the Rhone 
and created the New World called Europe, he was dis- 
covering a world which was to face not towards the 
Elbe, but towards the Atlantic : vergit ad septem triones. 

The third phase opens, then, when Caesar's galleys 
with oars, pine-built, from the Midland Sea, met the 
oaken sail-craft of the ocean-going Veneti. It passes 
by long transition of northern sea-powers in strife with 
southern, Northway against Midgard, to the point 
where northern and southern sea-powers, in league and 
rivalry, demonstrate simultaneously, by their discovery 
and colonization of the Americas, that the Atlantic, 
like the Mediterranean and the old Aegean, is no Outland 
Sea, but an Inter-continental Gulf, between the ' United ' 
and the ' Dis-united ' States ; and itself in turn the 
avenue, beyond its own pillars of Heracles, its Gates 
of Horn and Good Hope, into what might well seem at 
least to be a real Ocean. 

A fourth phase into which the world seems now 
to be passing, with the occupation of Australia and the 
Westward Coasts of America, and with the introduction 
of Western thought into India, Japan, and China, raises 
anew the question : Is not, after all, what seemed to 
be an Outer Sea, itself land-locked like its prototypes ? 
Have not the Eastern and the Western halves of our 
Mercator's projection served their turn long enough 
as coasts of a midland Atlantic ? Ought they not now, 
in fact, to be transposed, to be the inward-facing shores 
of a Pacific World. 



14 
III 

Let us now go back to the questions of method in 
Ancient History, which we put on one side just now, 
in order to survey the field of its operations, and fix 
its position both in general history and in relation to 
ourselves in the present. 

We saw that in all historical work, some of the 
materials are transmitted to the historian directly, and 
another part through the medium of previous historians 
more or less worthy of the name. But the ratio of the 
matter from the one source, to that supplied by the 
other, may vary almost infinitely. Here we strike upon 
one marked contrast between the two great departments 
which we call ' ancient ' and ' modern ' : namely, that 
the balance which exists, in all history, between its two 
aspects, between the direct writing of history, and the 
critical appreciation of history already written is quite 
differently adjusted in each of them. 

In almost all modern history, it is still possible to 
go behind the work of previous historians ; to begin 
approximately where they began, and to repeat, in our 
own persons, experiences like theirs. The materials 
for history are still there ; perhaps less copiously, perhaps 
(through some accident) more copiously, than when our 
predecessors sat down to write ; but it is from materials, 
not from our predecessors' work, that we set out ; and 
it is in the light of our knowledge of the materials them- 
selves, that we permit our own judgment to be guided, 
at all, by that of other historians, whom we have learned, 
by this method, to respect. 

In ancient history, it was long quite otherwise ; 
and it is because it is inevitably otherwise in some degree 
still, that Ancient History is still sometimes felt to be 
of a different quality from Modern, and is assigned a 
somewhat different position in our systems of knowledge. 
It is an obvious example of this feeling, that whereas 
we have in Oxford a separate Final Honours School of 



i5 

Modern History ; Ancient History forms only one section 
of the composite School of Literae Humaniores, in which a 
large part of your time is devoted to the systematic study 
of Philosophy, and another large part in practice to the 
literary criticism of certain ancient authors. The only 
reason for this which will make any appeal to Historians 
is that in ancient history a very large part of the work 
actually done consists simply in the attempt to rediscover 
from the historians themselves, what were the materials 
upon which they were working, irrespective of the further 
questions, first, how far these materials of theirs repre- 
sented, at all adequately, the real state of the case ; 
and then, how far the periods or topics about which 
these authors write were the only periods or topics 
worth studying, or even the most important. Thucy- 
dides, for example, believed that the Peloponnesian 
War was a^ioXoywraroi' tow irp\v — Herodotus would, 
I think, have said, a^iairrjywoTaTov ; what we are 
concerned in the very first place to discover, is whether, 
and in what sense, the Peloponnesian War deserved 
this high estimate ; and what grounds Thucydides had 
for making it. 

This interpretation of ancient historians we have 
for long been accustomed to effect in the light of two 
main classes of evidence. In the first place, we have the 
internal evidence of the historians themselves, and, 
closely allied to this, the witness of one historian for 
or against another. In the second place, we have a 
fragmentary collection of literary materials for history 
over and above the statements of any historian in the 
stricter sense of the word. It is all that has been saved, 
piecemeal, from the wreck of the old world ; it is of all 
degrees of historical interest ; and much of it comes 
to us from the hands of men whose outstanding service 
was that they knew so little of history-writing, as the 
great masters conceive it, that they left standing on 
their pages whole paragraphs and chapters which Thucy- 
dides would surely have excised. With such materials 



i6 

for history, and such only, at our command, it would 
clearly be lost labour to apply the methods of the his- 
torians of modern times. Glimpses of ancient history 
they might give us, here and there ; but they are quite 
insufficient for any reconstruction of antiquity, as history, 
such as is presented to us, for example, by Thucydides. 

This again is the only reason, which will at all move 
the historian, for the local cult of prescribed periods 
and 'set books.' It explains the close interdependence of 
periods and texts, and the very subordinate part which 
is commonly assigned, even within a prescribed period, 
to episodes or phases which the ' set books ' omit or 
neglect. Examples of all kinds of limitation will come 
before you, soon and often, in your ' Greats ' reading ; 
and it is well that you should be prepared for them from 
the outset. You may not have time or inclination to 
plunge into these dark corners of your subject, but it 
is well for your own mental honesty, that you should 
know under what limitations your are working ; the 
first step to knowledge is to realise that there are things 
which you have not tried to know. 

Now, as long as it was really the case that a few 
very great historians, themselves ancient, were your only 
sources, this handling of ancient history as a branch of 
ancient literature — for it really amounts to no less — 
was defensible in the main ; and if we consider for a 
moment that those ancient historians included Herodotus, 
Thucydides, and Tacitus, we can see that the inherent 
defects of it were minimised. The practical exclusion 
of Polybius (because either he wrote a century too soon, 
or Tacitus a century too late) suggests less gracious 
thoughts, and the consolation that if you may not read 
an author for ' the Schools,' you are at all events masters 
of your leisure. 

It is seldom safe for a historian to say that anything 
is out of date ; but he is not going beyond his business 
if he points out that circumstances alter cases. Even 
when Grote was writing, in the forties and fifties of 



<7 

the last century, the first-fruits were already being 
gathered of the great harvest of inscriptions : the store- 
houses of coin lore which had been amassed by Eckhel and 
Mionnet were beginning to be supplemented copiously ; 
and (what is more) were being used intelligently, since 
the economic researches of Boeckh. Grote himself, 
it is true, did not think it necessary to go to Syracuse, 
before writing about Epipolae and the Great Harbour ; 
but I^eake and Curtius were laying new foundations for 
classical topography, and Niebuhr was applying to 
Mediterranean lands the geographical methods of Ritter 
and the Humboldts. Ludwig Ross had navigated the 
Cyclades ; Pashley (in default of our own Iyiddell) had 
traversed Crete ; Penrose was at work on the Parthenon ; 
and Cockerell was applying, to the construction of 
the University Galleries, lessons learned on the spot at 
Athens, Aegina, and Phigaleia. 

The movement of which these were symptoms 
had its origin, as we all know, outside the circle of the 
Humanities ; but I do not think we can fairly say that 
the Humanities responded less promptly than Natural 
History to the new call when it came. Ancient history, 
which for long had been but little else than a branch of 
ancient literature, or at best a large department of 
classical studies, broke out, in fact, in the middle of 
the last century, into a wide group of ' historical sciences,' 
all alike concerned with the collection and arrangement 
of new classes of materials for history ; the significance, 
and in some cases even the existence, of which had been 
hardly appreciated before. The new harvest has been 
copious in all fields. It has been abundant, as you will 
see soon enough, in the periods which are prescribed for 
special study in Oxford ; but it is in some of those which 
are not, that the growth of knowledge has been greatest . 
Consequently, it is now far more nearly possible than it 
was, to attempt historical reconstruction of periods 
and aspects, of the Ancient World, which have not had a 
Thucydides or a Polybius. At the same time, it has 



i8 

become more probable — if indeed it had ever been really 
doubtful — that even the Thucydidean or the Polybian 
presentation of the ancient world is not necessarily 
final ; that old problems are open still for discussion 
and new research ; that new problems exist, which 
had been unsuspected before ; and that new materials, 
still coming to hand, are copious enough, and of suffi- 
ciently historical interest, to justify fresh solutions. 

Above all, the ancient historians, who for so long 
had been regarded mainly, if not wholly, as the artists 
of our picture of the old world, are being steadily pushed 
back themselves into the picture. Instead of viewing 
ancient history by their light, we come to study them 
in the light of ancient history ; and herewith the dis- 
tinction, formerly perceptible between Ancient and 
Modern History, begins to collapse and disappear. 
At best it was an artificial one ; a provisional confession 
of our impotence, never the resignation of our beliefs 
and hopes. 

IV 

This change in the position occupied by the great 
ancient historians is only one phase of the change which 
was inevitable in the position of all literary sources, 
as soon as non-literary sources, of whatever kind, were 
available, and recognised as being so. This change would 
not perhaps have been so noticeable as it has actually 
been, had it not happened that the literary guides, 
which had for so long been so nearly all-in-all, turned 
out to be surprisingly blind, when the appeal was made 
to them to interpret the new evidence. Nothing, I 
think, has brought home so forcibly to students of ancient 
history the fragmentariness of all literary sources, as 
the discovery that so many new things, which were not 
in the literature at all, were knowable about the ancient 
world ; and the result has been to demonstrate, with 
peculiar insistence, the existence of two quite distinct 



i9 

points of view from which to regard the history of an 
ancient people. 

On the one hand, clearly, we may take such a 
people at their own valuation, and base our estimate 
of them on the story which they told about themselves . 
We may start, that is, from their historical literature, 
and formulate from this the conception which the nation 
itself formed of its mission in the world, of the difficulties 
which it encountered, and of the guidance, human and 
otherwise, through which it believed that it overcame 
those difficulties, and attained its object. But if we 
take this road we shall do well to remember that, in 
the life of a nation, as in that of an individual, there will 
certainly be many things, of which the subject of the 
autobiography was but imperfectly aware, even if they 
were consciously realised at all ; that the standard of 
values will necessarily be a personal one, and that occas- 
ionally, even in the best-balanced natures, the wish 
may be father to the thought. It is not always the prin- 
cipal actor in a scene in which emotions run high, and 
ideals stand out clear and near, who is the best witness 
afterwards as to the things which actually happened. 
We shall also have. to keep in mind that a nation, even 
more than an individual, is a very complex thing, and 
that a large part of its growth takes place, as in the 
other case, unconsciously. While the great thinkers 
and creators at the top are living the life of reason and 
emotion, there is a vast mass of living matter at the 
bottom which has little time for either ; it lives, and 
moves, and has its being, but it takes no further part in 
the matter ; except that one fine day it inflames, or rots, 
or is crushed or amputated beyond repair ; and the 
last people to tell you how it all happened are those who 
were advancing head in air and enjoying the view. Not 
one of the statesmen or historians of antiquity was able 
to explain, any more than he could remedy that ' distress 
of nations with perplexity ' that nightmare of pessimism 
beyond all temporary or local alleviation for fear of those 



20 

things which were coming on the earth. They put it 
down to the gods, to misgovernment, to original sin ; 
they did not know — nor did we till yesterday — the 
bow in the cloud could bring death to man as well as 
life : that Nature was cutting off the water. 

The other way of enquiry is that which is followed 
perforce in the study of inanimate nature ; in the study 
of the other animals ; and indeed in the study of nine- 
tenths of humanity as well. It consists in collecting, 
first of all, the extant remains of the peoples themselves, 
and of their works ; and in constructing, from the data 
supplied by these remains, a presentation of the origin, 
the history, and the characteristics of their civilisation. 
If the extant remains include a literature, that is of 
course an enormous gain ; and if the literature includes 
a historian, that gain is greater still. But this source of 
evidence is not indespensible to the method ; and if a 
literature does in this way come under review, the first 
question which we put to it is ' how far is its record in 
conformity with the rest of the evidence ' ? Were the 
people, that is good judges of themselves, and of their 
place in the world ? And clearly it will be only in 
proportion as the literature or any part of it sustains 
this test, that the literary documents will be admitted 
as evidence at all. 

Broadly speaking, the mode of study which I am 
now trying to describe is that which in the case of living 
races we call anthropology ; in the case of peoples whose 
career is over, we call it archaeology, which is anthropo- 
logy in the past tense : not forgetting, however, that in 
current usage archaeology is always tending to have 
(two) other usages, more specific and limited, according 
as the distinction is drawn between the literary evidence 
on the one hand, and the non-literary on the other ; 
or between evidence for mere daily life of the people, and 
for higher thought and feeling. 

Now, obviously, in (either of) these narrower inter- 
pretations, archaeology is just as much in danger of 



21 

presenting a one-sided and imperfect picture, as is the 
exclusive study of the literary evidence. It may give 
us an outline of the conditions of material life, of the 
arts and manufactures, warfare and commerce ; of the 
masses of the population, and also, with good luck, of 
the minority who live in kings' palaces ; it will measure 
ups and downs of national prosperity so far as imports 
and exports can measure them ; of national morality 
so far as honesty in workmanship, or exchange, is a clue 
to that ; of the standard of taste, so far as this is expressed 
in decorative art employed upon some durable material. 
But it will necessarily fail to distinguish the fool from 
the sage ; the poet, or the prophet, or the patriot, from 
the prodigal, or the man with the muckrake. The latter 
in fact will be, if anything, the most conspicuous of them 
all ; for his goods, at all events, cannot follow him where 
he is gone ; but remain to divert the archaeologist. 

Now the ideal state of things would exist if we were 
able to apply both these methods to it, concurrently 
to a people as it grew ; to watch literary achievement 
accumulating on the one hand, and potsherds piling 
up on the other ; to feel the pulse and listen to the cries 
of infant genius, and to construct a history which should 
be autobiography and ethnology in one. But the child 
of genius is not born with a thermometer in its mouth, 
and the only civilisation which we are privileged to study 
de die is that of the early twentieth century. 

Next best would be the case in which the whole 
of the surviving records should be thrown pell-mell into 
our lap ; physique, artefacts, and literature, all in one 
heap, to disentangle at our will ; and there are instances 
in which almost this has happened,by the sudden accident 
of discovery ; as for example in Minoan Crete, or in the 
sand-buried sites of the Taklamakan. For here, at all 
events, neither side of the evidence would be at advantage 
in face of the other ; or at least it would be our own fault 
or misfortune if we allowed any class of data to possess 
us, to the exclusion of any other. 



22 

Far commoner is it that either the material evidence 
has come to us in abundance, and the literature — the 
men's own story — eludes us yet ; as we have it for the 
most part in Egypt, in Central and Northern Europe, 
and among the illiterates of Outland ; or else, where the 
literature and all that that brings with it has survived, 
but the soil has closed over cities and temples, and the 
land is left without inhabitant. In either case, there is 
obviously grave danger that it may become customary 
to apply methods of enquiry which, however suitable 
to their immediate purpose, stop short of a point which 
would qualify the student to deal with new and hetero- 
geneous material, if it came ; merely because method 
itself has become atrophied on one side or other, for 
sheer want of corrective evidence ; the skill of the enquirer 
meanwhile has become specialised in the direction where 
there was most to do. 

A good and extreme instance of this atrophy is 
the history of Jewish history. For more than two 
thousand years a great literature has been the subject 
of persistent and detailed study, on literary lines, 
though with the additional limitation that certain 
prevalent beliefs as to the character of this literature 
prevented certain advances, even in literary criticism, 
which had been made in the study of other literatures, 
such for example as those of Greece and Rome, from 
being regarded as applicable to the interpretation of 
this one. Still less, as may well be imagined, were lines 
of investigation which either started from, or took 
account of, evidence other than literary, regarded as 
capable of leading to conclusions of the same validity 
as those which resulted from the specialised literary 
method. In the meantime political circumstances 
which had nothing whatever to do with the matter at 
issue, had the effect of cutting off the students of Jewish 
literature for more than a thousand years from all oppor- 
tunity of access either to the archaeological evidence 
for Jewish history ; or to any other branch of ancient 



23 

Semitic literature. And at home, too, an inadequate 
hypothesis of the relation of Man to Nature, and a similar 
divorce of tradition from observation in the study of 
Greek antiquity, also prevented the great majority 
of students even from imagining how great was the blank 
in their knowledge. 

It is only within the last two generations therefore 
that the political decay of the Turkish Empire on one 
side, and the irruption, on the other, of the methods of 
the geologist, the geographer, and the evolutionary 
biologist, into the fields of literary criticism and com- 
parative mythology, have re-written from end to end the 
history of the Jews, as an integral part of an ordered 
History of the Nearer East, itself, as we have seen already, 
conceived as the history of two great riparian cultures, 
their intercourse with each other, and their perils at 
the hands of men from the Plateaux and the Steppe. 
This larger history has indeed but one chapter still not 
wholly written — that namely which shall deal with the 
ancient peoples of the Plateau heart of Asia Minor ; 
for Egypt, for Babylonia and Assyria, and for all the 
principal divisions of the Syrian highland, its outlines 
are not only traced, but for the most part filled with 
detail. Yet all this has been done with materials for 
history which were only in small part literary ; even 
where they were literary at all, they had but the slightest 
claim to rank as history in themselves. 



V 

The call to wake up to a view of history which was 
less purely autobiographical came, as we have seen, to 
the historians of the last century mainly from the natural- 
ists. The new materials themselves too, no less than 
the processes by which they were accumulated, resembled 
closely those of other descriptive sciences, such as geo- 
graphy ; and particularly those, like geology and 



24 

palaeontology, in which the series, which the data can 
constitute are sequences in time. So it need not surprise 
us that historians have experienced a strong temptation 
to assimilate the methods and aims of their own study to 
those of these natural sciences ; to insist upon quantities 
and statistics, uniformities and recurrences ; perhaps 
even to go in search of them ; and, in general, to work 
towards the establishment of broad generalisations, 
worthy of the name of Historical Laws. This tendency 
has by no means exhausted its force as yet ; and it is 
important that we should be clear as to its working ; 
for it is as true in history as it is in chemistry that, 
unless you are very careful, you will find what you set 
out to seek. 

History, by common consent, deals with the fortunes 
of human societies and their members ; the performances 
of individuals, when they do not involve the fortunes of 
the rest, may be matter for biography, or for a history 
of morals ; but they are not history in the strict unquali- 
fied sense. History, that is, is essentially ethnographic, 
social and political, rather than ethical andanthropo- 
graphic. But all societies, as Aristotle knew long ago, 
yiyvovTai uev rod £rjv eveicev, eicri Se tov eu fyjv ; in their 
lowest terms they represent Man's alliance with other 
men against insistent nature ; at their highest, his 
alliance with men against insistent wrong ; and there is 
every gradation between. 

Now, the mere struggle for existence against the 
forces of nature stands, of course, in the same class of 
occurrences with the struggle of any other animal. 
It is consequently matter for just such generalisations as 
are familiar to biologists. There is nothing, either, to 
prevent us from regarding it from the same impersonal 
standpoint, the standpoint of nature itself, as any other 
' natural ' occurrence. It is therefore indifferent to the 
ethnographer and even to the sociologist whether we 
are studying the conditions of life, and the course of 
advancement, in the valleys of the Nile and Euphrates, 



25 

or in those of the Mississippi and the Yangtze ; in the 
Mediterranean and the Aegean that we know, or in 
other Mediterranean Seas — the Carib Sea, and the 
Great Lakes of North America — or in the giant archi- 
pelago and submerged islands of Malaysia. But when 
we are looking at the higher functions, a difference 
appears ; and a greater difference, in proportion as 
these functions approach the highest. The Nile and the 
Euphrates differ profoundly, in value to ourselves, 
from the Yangtze and the Amazon, or even from the 
Ganges ; the Carib Sea belongs to fiction, to Rousseau, 
and Man Friday ; but the Mediterranean is in our own 
world ; as a theatre of history it stands in a place which 
is unique ; for its human societies are relatives and ances- 
tors of our own ; it is the kind of difference which we 
admit, between this or that old man, and our own 
grandfather. 

It is here, then, that history parts company simul- 
taneously from ethnography and from sociology, the 
most intimate and the closest clinging of its associates 
in the order of the sciences. The anthropologist treats 
Man just as any other sort of biologist must treat any 
other part of the animal kingdom, sub specie naturae ; 
as an important chapter, truly, but still only as one 
chapter in the grand treatise nrepi <f>u<rem — ' On how 
things grow.' History, on the contrary, treats Man and 
his works as related to the present and to us. It is es- 
sentially anthropocentric ; if I may extend my former 
metaphor a little, not merely are the ancient historians 
' in the picture,' but we ourselves too are in the very 
plane of the canvas ; at the junction, that is, of the past 
with the present. 

This is how it comes about that whole cycles of 
real history — it may be, even of written history — do 
not find their way at all into the historian's library, 
but remain on the shelves of the anthrolologist. A good 
recent instance is Mr. Torday's reconstitution of the 
political history of the Bushongo. The long history of 



26 

the Maoris is another, and that of other groups of the 
Polynesians falls into the same category. ' What's 
Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba ' ? * 

The distinction between two branches of science 
is now clear ; and we have only to bear it in mind. Never 
has history been in greater need of a sound sociology, 
and (for that matter) of a sound anthropology also, 
if it is to do to-day and to-morrow its Danaid's task 
of interpreting the past to the present. But for the same 
reason, never has there been more urgent need for care 
lest the rival attractions of culture or economics, or 
politics either, distract the historian from his own 
proper business, which is that of writing, not sociology 
or politics, but history. 

VI 

Hitherto I have been dealing only with those new 
sources of material for history, which have been opened 
in the search for traces of Man's own handiwork, or by 
the comparative study of societies and institutions. 
To collect these materials, and still more to master the 
meaning of them, historians have had to borrow methods 
from the natural sciences, and have been led into en- 
tanglements with branches of the knowledge of Man, 
which differ in no essential respect from other departments 
of biology in their aims and the quality of their results. 
The data, however, which I have had in view down to 
this point, are all derived from the direct and specific 
study of Man himself and his creations. 

* Anthropological occurrences however, may, of course, and often do, enter into 
the historian's consideration as illustrations of occurrences belonging to the Mediter- 
ranean or the Nearer East. No one who wishes to come to close contact with the 
institutions of sports, for example, can afford to neglect those of the Iroquois or the 
East African Masai ; or the organisation of Mexico or Peru, if he is concerned with 
that of Ancient Persia. In the same way, both the obscure movements of barbarous 
peoples across the mountain barrier which limits the Mediterranean region on the 
North, and the still more obscure movements which we can now trace taking place 
along it, find close and instructive analogies in the history of the mountain frontiers 
of Northern India and Persia, and of the long chains of South-East Asia, and of the 
American Rockies. 

It is instructive also to notice how Natural History itself may develop anthro- 
pocentric phases : current developments of bacteriology are cases in point The old 
toast, ' Here's to Scientific Discovery, may it never be of use to anybody,' is rapidly 
passing into a by-word. 



27 

But there is another aspect of human activity, 
which concerns the historian directly, but in the study 
of which not only the method, but a great part of the 
data comes from a non-human and at first sight even a 
non-historical science in the sense in which I have 
described as ' historical ' the sciences of geology and 
palaeontology. 

Common knowledge, as well as metaphysic, 
testifies that all human activities occur in space as well 
as in time ; man being a terrestrial animal, all history 
finds its materials in some region of the planetary sur- 
face. All history, therefore, has a geographical aspect. 
It asks of course primarily ' what was it that happened, 
and how ? ' But just as it necessarily asks ' when,' so 
also must it ask ' where.' The converse is of course 
true also. All geographical facts occur ' some when ' 
as well as ' somewhere ' ; all geographical knowledge 
takes account of processes in time as well as distributions 
in space, and consequently needs must have a historical 
aspect. At first sight, therefore, there is complete overlap 
between the History and the Geography of Man. 

But, as we have seen already in the case of anthro- 
pology, this overlap does not trouble the historian. 
The geography of Man considered as one department 
of the study of the earth's surface, has its standard of 
interest within itself, like any other branch of natural 
science. If I may coin a phrase, it is geocentric ; for 
the geographer, that is, Tfj iravriav /xerpov. History, 
however, as we have already seen, is anthropocentric ; 
no fact of human distribution, or human activity in 
space, is of concern to the historian at all unless it stands 
in intelligible relation with man's present efforts to 
achieve. To take an extreme instance, it would be a 
discovery of the first importance to geographers, if 
it were shown that there are men in Mars ; but though 
it might be shown that these had been there from the 
beginning, it would need a cosmic revolution to bring 
Martians within the ken of history. 



28 

What determines, then, whether this or that region, 
or locality, has value for the historian ? or to put the 
same question another way, what is the geographical 
distribution of historical interest ? This distribution is 
clearly quite independent of time ; it may vary, there- 
fore, and we know very well that it has varied, from 
one period of history to another. 

Now we have seen already, in tracing the line of 
demarcation between history and anthropology, that 
all the varied forms of human activity — and we may 
now add, the geographical distribution of each of them 
— are consequences of one fundamental activity of 
man, which is concerned, as in the case of other animals, 
simply with the attempt to preserve life in the midst 
of nature : or at best is the struggle to perpetuate 
human life at a stage slightly in advance of that at 
which it stood before. That struggle to maintain life 
takes a specific form and direction in each region of the 
earth. But the precise form that it assumes is not the 
result of human reason unaided and uncontrolled ; 
it depends no less on the quality and degree of many 
forces of nature ; on the external, non-human circum- 
stances of fauna, and flora, of climate, and surface - 
relief. In each given case the struggle has issued as it 
has only because human reason, applied to one central 
everpresent problem of preserving human life at all, 
has hit upon the particular plan which on the whole 
maintains human life in the best way under the circum- 
stances of the particular region. Now many — in fact 
immeasurably the larger number — of the occurrences 
which make up the human struggle for existence happen 
with such uniformity in all habitable regions that they 
resemble rather the daily round of an animal's existence 
than the performances of a reasonable being. All these, 
and the distribution of them, are still the case of the 
geographer and the sociologist. Others, again, are more 
specially and more and more fortuitously distributed, 
until at the further end of the series, we reach the ' his- 



2 9 

toric event,' which occurs once for all, and only in one 
place, and never repeats itself ; presumably because the 
conditions for its repetition cannot be assembled again, 
either there or anywhere else. 

It is at this other end of the series that the historian's 
interest is highest. It is the historian's business — as we 
are accustomed to see by this time — to select from 
among the rest, and to present intelligibly in their true 
proportions and relations, just those events which are 
the real turning points. These events are of more or 
less importance historically ; partly according as they 
affect a wider or a narrower circle of humanity ; partly , 
again, according as the subsequent course of events 
differs profoundly, or not, from that which may be 
shown to have been likely, if the event in question had 
happened otherwise ; most of all, perhaps, according 
as the historian is forced, by his own skill and experience, 
to decide that the crucial factor was the human factor ; 
that to all outward appearance, the Great Man was, 
in popular language, ' free to choose ' between different 
courses of action. In such cases, it is often possible even 
for contemporaries to form a reasonable and accurate 
opinion as to the consequences of an opposite decision. 

These moments of crisis, of equipoise, present the 
great problems of history, for they are the occasions 
when humanity has been active in its highest function, 
in the persons of the men who make history. Croesus 
as we say, is at the Halys, or Caesar at the Rubicon, 
or Augustus at the Rhine ; or Pericles or Fabius carries 
Peace — or War — upon his tongue. Those which are 
of really first-rate importance are few in number, and 
old acquaintances. To discover a new one, indeed, 
whether in ancient or in any other history, would be a 
greater achievement than to discover a chemical element 
or a new mode of energy. But though they are old 
acquaintances, and though each historian in turn attempts 
a solution, they remain, as problems, perennial : to 
solve one of them finally, to eliminate it, or to subsume 



30 

it in another, would, again, be as great a triumph of 
science as to eliminate or transmute gold. 

It would be only too easy to slip from this position, 
which we have found to underlie the definition alike 
of Herodotus and of Bduard Meyer, into a conception 
of History as an exclusive study of the Influence of 
Great Men ; and the course of historical writing in the 
past offers much to support such a view. Man's interest 
in himself has never been less keen than his interest 
in nature ; and his knowledge of himself, though not 
always so early reduced to such system as his knowledge 
of nature, has outrun it appreciably, in depth and truth, 
in most ages of the world. We have, therefore, to expect 
that there should be in the main a greater risk of an 
enslavement of history to biography than to geography ; 
interpreting the latter term as the inclusive study of 
non-human processes and changes upon this earth. 
But we may reasonably expect on the other side that an 
age like our own, distinguished beyond all predecessors 
by great advances in its knowledge of nature and by huge 
new problems of human need face to face with nature, 
which its own social growth as well as its very knowledge 
of nature, has set before it, may be inclined to lay stress 
upon the study of the regional environment of societies, 
for the same reason as impels it to lay stress within 
those societies themselves, less upon the voices of the 
great men, than on the clamour or the response of the 
masses. 



VII 

I have spent as much time as this, upon the relations 
between History and Geography, for two particular 
reasons. The first is that so far as it is possible to look 
ahead, it seems likely that this application of geographical 
criticism to historical problems— this insistence on the 
question ' Why did what happened thus and then, happen 



3 1 

also precisely here, and here, and not there ' ? — may in 
the near future become a popular aspect of historical 
study, perhaps even a dangerously popular one. It is, 
however, one of the rare privileges of the historian, as 
of the poet, and the painter, to be always interpreting 
old facts, old problems, and old situations, to new minds ; 
and to be interpreting them always, too, in the light of 
new knowledge, cast upon them from a fresh point of 
view. It is our duty, therefore, as well as our temptation , 
to take full toll of current knowledge, and the fresh 
discoveries of our time. At one moment they will be 
coming from literary criticism, at another, from material 
remains ; at a third, from the comparison of institutions 
or social habits. Bach wave of experience casts up its 
treasures at our feet ; the pearls are to be worn, not 
trampled on ; provided we gather them, what matters 
their order upon the string. But it is our temptation 
as well as our duty ; and if so, it is well to be fore-warned, 
and to know what we are doing. Geography is not 
history, and cannot be confused with it ; but geographical 
facts are among the first materials for history, and in 
the equipment of a historian, geographical experience 
is indispensable. 

In the second place, the special conditions under 
which Ancient History is studied in Oxford, seem to me 
to justify some insistence on a geographical point of 
view. I have already assumed the liberty of criticising 
a system of knowledge, and of education, which includes 
the History of the Ancient World in a composite group 
of Classical Studies, and still tends sometimes to treat 
it as if it were a branch of Ancient literature . The 
system, however, has gain as well as loss. On the one 
hand, it tolerates a popular conception of history which 
is in any case narrow and specific, and at first sight seems 
also a lower one. 

On the other, from the beginner's point of view, 
there is gain. No man, it has been truly said, can be a 
historian merely ; in proportion as anyone has attempted 



32 

this, he has merely failed to be a historian at all. Con- 
sidered, therefore, as a preliminary course for a man 
who intends hereafter to devote himself to History, a 
mixed course like that of ' Greats ' has obvious and 
peculiar advantages. 

Not least among these advantages is the opportunity 
which it offers for the treatment of selected periods of 
History on broad regional lines ; for the treatment of 
Greek and Roman History, that is, as the history of Man 
in the Mediterranean region. 

The conception of a regional treatment of a subject, 
though familiar now to historians as to naturalists, 
comes in the first instance from the geographers ; but 
I do not think that I shall be trespassing appreciably 
if I explain quite briefly what I mean. 

In geography as in other branches of learning, it 
is possible, of course, to treat the whole subject matter 
in order analytically, taking our examples of the inter- 
action of natural forces indifferently from all portions 
of the planet. But modern geographical teaching 
proceeds increasingly, and I think, inevitably, on a 
regional basis. Brief introduction to the main classes 
of geographical facts, and to the main features of their 
planetary distribution qualifies an intelligent person to 
watch and disentangle the principal geographical factors 
in a given geographical region ; experience thus gained, 
whether of theory or of method, though acquired almost 
wholly in a limited region, is found to be clear, coherent, 
and applicable easily to enquiries elsewhere ; and current 
geographical teaching inclines steadily towards this 
regional method of study as the most efficient, as well 
as the most economical in respect of time. The method, 
as we see at once, presents close analogies with the use 
of ' set books ' in teaching a language ; after brief analy- 
tical study of the forms we confront even beginners 
with the ' fine confused feeding ' of grammatical con- 
structions as they flow from the pen of Xenophon or 
Caesar. 



33 

Look now at the regional method as we apply it to 
the study of History. The historian's business is to 
describe Man's experiences and achievements, so far as 
these are of historical interest ; that is, so far as they 
serve to explain how Man has reached his present stage 
in the struggle to live well. Now it cannot be too 
strongly insisted that in dealing with the civilisations 
of the Ancient Bast, and no less with the civilisation 
of Greece and Rome, we are dealing with civilisations 
which are correlated in a strict and intimate way 
with particular geographical regions ; and that the 
reason why classical studies in particular have been 
regarded so widely as having parted company with 
reality and practice is that they have been pursued 
far too regardless of this regional geographical 
control. 

There is of course historical reason for their neglect. 
In the early days of the Renascence the scholars them- 
selves were mainly of Mediterranean origin, or at least 
had made pilgrim's acquaintance with Mediterranean 
conditions. There was therefore little need for the inter- 
preters of the classics to dwell on the physical sur- 
roundings of the ancient world ; in essentials they were 
the same as those of the Revival of Learning. But as 
the centres of humanist activity shifted beyond the 
Alps, and the Turk laid more jealous hold on Greek 
lands, empirical knowledge faded, and classical weather, 
classical allusions to flowers and herbs, and still more 
those classical customs and institutions, such as seasonal 
warfare, a national drama, and democracy itself, which 
depended on Mediterranean conditions for their realisa- 
tion, passed, with much else that was admittedly in- 
capable of realisation on the Atlantic sea-board, into 
the common heritage of scholarship. 

No wonder if, with this inherent defect and omission 
in the classical tradition as it reached these northern 
lands, and in the equipment of the scholars themselves, 
the idea went abroad among the larger world which 



34 

only heard of scholarship from its school-children — 
that the ' ancient world f of Greece and Rome lies in 
some mysterious way on the other side of a great 
gulf. 

No wonder, either, if (even now) many who are 
attracted by the beauty or the truth of classical literature 
or art, and are convinced that these things are indeed real 
and living and useful to the modern world, yet feel 
themselves held aloof, if they try to come nearer, by 
something of this same unfamiliarity, this queerness 
and unearthliness of outlook, and are baffled, they know 
not why. 

I am prepared for the objection that to many of 
us, Greek and Roman life does not seem queer at all ; 
any more, you will admit, than the behaviour of the 
beasts in Aesop's fables, or a large part of early Jewish 
History. But that is because in all these cases our whole 
upbringing has been among heirlooms ; it does not alter 
the queerness of the things which we accept so dully as 
part of the furniture of our world. But make the ex- 
periment for yourselves. Try Aesop's Fables upon a 
slum child ; try Homer or Herodotus, or even Plutarch, 
upon the hard-headed student who has merely come up 
the ' ladder,' from the primary school of an industrial 
town into this beanstalk-country of the humanities, 
and I think you will see what I mean when I describe 
the old world and its civilisation as queer. Try another 
experiment, too. Go, in travel-books, if not in steamers, 
to the modern Bast, or even to the remoter parts of 
the modern Mediterranean ; go to Egypt, if you can, in 
the spirit in which Herodotus went ; or to any pagan 
country, in the spirit in which he went to Scythia ; 
searching out epya jueyaXa kcu Owimaa-ra, and I think 
you will get glimpses — certainly that is how I began to 
get them — of the realities which give rise to this strange- 
ness. It was one of the best moments in the course of 
my teaching in Oxford, when I asked an old pupil, 
newly back from India, some commonplace question, 



35 

how he liked the East : ' Oh, India is fine,' he said, * it's 
just like Herodotus.' 

Now it seems to me that one chief reason why 
ancient history is valued as it is, in our scheme of educa- 
tion, as well as in our scheme of knowledge, is precisely 
this strangeness and aloofness— and at the same time 
that the reason why so many people go through the 
ordinary classical course without much profit is precisely 
because they have let themselves take this feature of it 
for granted, instead of letting it wake them up, and 
search out the reasons for it. Let me say frankly on 
the other hand that it is from students of the type I 
have described, who have come to these things later and 
unhardened, or who have succeeded in retaining till 
they came up to the University something of their 
first child's wonder at the ancient world, that I am 
indebted for some of the best side-lights on ancient 
life. 

Now I believe that it is possible to bring home 
to such students as these— and the type will be recognised 
I think, as a more and .more familiar one — this vital 
fact, that it is precisely because Greeks and Romans 
were in all essential points human with our humanity, 
and rational as we count reason, that they wove about 
themselves in their daily walk with nature in a Mediter- 
ranean—not a North Atlantic— world, a civilisation 
which appears to us in so many ways incomprehensible. 
The very reason, in fact, why the ancient world seemed 
to us all, at first sight, so remote, is not that the men were 
different ; least of all that they belong, in any sense, to 
any curiously gifted branch of the human race to begin 
with. It is rather this, above all, that in the Mediter- 
ranean region nature herself was, and is, different from 
the nature that we know in these islands of the Atlantic 
sea-board ; and that the problem, not merely of living 
well, but of maintaining human life at all, presented 
different aspects and demanded a different solution, in 
the geographical circumstances of Greece or Italy, from 



36 

that which our no less human intellect and experience 
have discovered for them here. 



VIII 

I hinted just now that I have known cases where 
Herodotus has taught men to see India ; that the attempt 
to realise and interpret that international exhibition 
of his, in the sense in which he felt its instructiveness, 
is good discipline in what I might describe as regional 
history. I do not mean to say that your commentary 
on those earlier books of his, in which the scene is most 
crowded with epya ueyaXa koi donxaa-ra from Babylon, 
Egypt, and the Persian Empire, ought to trespass at 
all on more strictly historical enquiries if you have 
already the materials and the right point of view. But 
I do feel very strongly that at the outset of ' Greats ' 
work, when there is still elbow room, and much sunshine 
between you and the Schools, you can do worse than 
expatiate rather freely ; and with Herodotus among 
your set books, you may do it with a good conscience. 
You need have no fear that knowledge of Herodotus 
will damage your feeling for Thucydides ; behind that 
tense reserve there is wider knowledge of Greek lands 
than you suspect until you begin to know Greece well ; 
just as there is clearer insight, closer grip, and more 
coherent thinking than you would guess, until you 
know Greece well, in the table talk and museum talk 
of Herodotus. 

;No one expects you, now, to read ancient history as 
you would read it if you had to stop and be examined 
this June. You are beginning 3'our course ; it is founda- 
tions, not pinnacles, that you should be building ; and 
you cannot lay foundations without materials ; without 
materia in its old Roman sense. Remember also that 
foundations are not meant to show ; only to be solid and 
wide. At this stage, you can hardly read too widely, 



37 

within the regional limits of the old world ; and you may 
easily go beyond it without wasting your time. Books 
like Hollis' Masai and Shwy Yeo's Soul of a People were 
not written when I read ' Greats ' ; but we had Eothen 
and Hadji Baba ; and Codington's Melanesia came out 
in my third year. There was already some Ramsay,' 
and a copy of Devia Cypria was going about ; but we 
still read Conybeare and Howson, and Smith's Voyage 
and Shipwreck of St. Paul; and of course Sinai and 
Palestine, and Layard's Nineveh, and Moltke's Letters 
from Turkey. 

You can hardly go wrong either at this stage, in 
throwing yourself into the questions of the hour. It is 
your privilege to begin ' Greats ' in 1910 ; as it was mine 
in 1890, when we labelled the Iyion Gate ' Phrygian,' 
and assigned the rest of Mycenae to the Carians of 
Thucydides ; when we grew warm over Mirage Orientate 
and the Matriachate, and heard from Cambridge 
the first rumblings of Totemism, and read the Golden 
Bough and the Poliieia ; you will remember that they 
were new books almost together. We went a good way 
with Miiller - Striibing on Thucydides, and a good 
way with Professor Sayce on Herodotus, but I remember 
one early question that perplexed us even then : — ' If 
Herodotus is such a fool as they make out, why do 
they go on setting him for " Greats " ? ' 

These were some of our third year foundations for 
history ; the foundations of twenty years ago. ' Wood, 
hay, stubble,' you will say. Well, it is a question of 
degree. Some of us may live to see Mommsen's Caesar — 
to speak only of the dead — go the same road as Grote's 
Cleon and Alexander. Meanwhile, we must live when 
we can ; and provided we are alive, what matter if it 
be in Mommsen's Rome ? 

It matters, in fact, much less what men think, 
than why they think it. The precise content of theii 
thoughts depends far too much upon temporary and 
local conditions, and changes only too promptly in 



3« 

response to the changes of these. It is the point of view 
from which they approach the new problem ; the pre- 
dispositions which they bring ; the training which their 
faculties have acquired through their previous experiences 
which make the outcome of their thinking in any given 
case so incalculable often beforehand ; so easy, after- 
wards, to explain in the light of a larger survey ; so real 
to them ; and of so permanent an interest to the historian. 
But it is the wider survey to which the historian 
aspires, which permits and authenticates the explanation 
of the things thought. What neither the historian, nor 
the psychologist can hope to do is to explain the thinker 
of them the hero or the genius. That phenomenon 
remains presupposed ; a primum mobile, with effects 
indeed, but no causes within human view : and the 
historian's business is twofold. To follow forward the 
effects of the great man's interference in affairs ; but 
also to follow backward what we can trace backwards, 
the antecedents of the other factors, society, culture, and 
environment, among which, at this particular moment, 
the new personality intervened ; the opyava, e/nyjsvxa and 
other, with which he strove to effect what he had it 
in his mind to imagine ; though the work of art, when done, 
was not often quite what the artist started to create. 
Of the actual deeds, and words, and even of the thoughts 
of great men in the old world, we are never likely to 
know much more than we do now ; but the increase in 
our knowledge of the other factors still seems limitless. 
Till limits appear, these are our contributions to the 
problem Si' »/V airirjv eiroXifMrjcrav a\\ij\oicri ; it is in 
the new light of them that we restate what Herodotus 

knew. 

That is how history grows evergreen. It is our own 
experience that we bring to it, our personal enthusiasms 
that we lavish on it, which make it historically real. I4ke 
the grand parents in the Blue Bird, the old people are 
always there when we think of them ; but it is we who 
make them wake up ; and each time we go to see them, it 



39 

is we who have grown — sometimes almost out of recog- 
nition. One time it is with pick and basket that we go 
to them ; another, we take our churingas to play with ; 
and we generally end, like Tyltyl, in making the old 
place a bear garden. But next time anyone goes, he 
finds the old people once more, as Tyltyl did ' just like 
when they were here.' It is only they, who find him 
altered. So I sometimes imagine Herodotus too, some- 
where in the old place, asking us, each time, to ' come 
again soon,' still eager to hear epya /ueyaka kcu dco/mao-ra. 
of his grandchildren in history ; still demanding of us, 
Greeks and Trojans alike, in our warfare over him, 
Si* fjv airlrjv €Tro\e/jLr)(rav aWqXouri. 



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